Discovery Music Finds There Is a Market for Tapes Made for Newborns

In the “thirtysomething” era of aerobics videos for kids, fetal phones to talk to the not-yet-born and gourmet baby food, it seems inevitable that someone would produce music for infants.

Fivesomething years ago, record industry veteran Ellen Wohlstadter, now 35, was searching for music to play for her newborn son, Jason. Finding nothing she liked, she and her husband, David, now 36, produced their own cassette with a variety of traditional lullabies such as “Rock-a-Bye-Baby” with ballads they grew up listening to written by the Beatles and other artists. The cassette, which sold for nearly $10, primarily in baby furniture stores, was a hit.

With about $30,000, the couple started their own firm, Discovery Music, a specialty music company that is becoming to infant music what the K-Tel label is to oldies.

From their comfortable home in Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles County, the Wohlstadters have released five cassettes of music for infants since starting their company in October, 1985. They include two anthologies of lullabies, one tape of songs with morning themes such as “O, What a Beautiful Morning,” one of silly songs and one of travel songs such as “Side by Side” to play in a car. Planned for release this year is a bathing cassette featuring “Splish Splash” and others with that theme.

Discovery Music is still in the infant stage itself--the Wohlstadters have only five employees--but the couple closely guard their sales figures, citing competition. The couple say that sales rose 85% in 1988 and that their tapes are sold in about 5,000 stores. Music industry executives say the market for music for children younger than 3 has probably grown from virtually nothing 5 years ago to $5 million to $10 million today. Some believe that Discovery may have as much as half that market.

Big-Name Competition

As silly as it may seem to some, music for infants has become one of the hottest areas of children’s music, which overall is a nearly $200-million-a-year business. Nashville music producer J. Aaron Brown, who has a Grammy-nominated recording of original lullabies written by his in-house songwriters, said he sold 300,000 of the cassettes last year. Most were sold in gift shops, he said, which sell them for $12.95.

And the business has started to attract big-name companies. Disney Records in Burbank earlier this year released “Disney’s Lullaby Favorites,” which includes a folk version of “When You Wish Upon a Star” sung by rocker Stephen Bishop.

Ellen Wohlstadter said she is worried by large companies’ entry into the market. “People say competition is good, but they have a lot of money behind them. They can do a lot of advertising and other things we can’t do at this point,” she said.

Other major record labels are also considering producing lullaby tapes.

“We think it’s a very fertile market,” said Mark Jaffe, director of children’s marketing for A & M Records. Jaffe said A & M has not yet produced a lullaby tape, mainly because it is searching for a singer the label believes can be marketed well.

Much of the lullaby cassettes’ success is not so much that they are designed to appeal to infants--who are probably indifferent to the music they hear--than that they are as something for parents in their 20s and 30s to listen to as they soothe crying babies or put them to bed. That would explain why one Discovery lullaby tape includes a cover version of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” on the same cassette with the traditional “German Lullaby.”

Nightly Music

Some parents believe that their babies enjoy the music. Rosine Hermodson-Olsen, a mother in Frederick, S.D., said that she is a strong believer in playing music for infants and that she went so far as to play music for her son, Joseph, now 7 months old, while he was still in the womb. She said she plays Discovery tapes for him almost every night.

“I play it if he’s a little antsy or if his teeth hurt. I think it relaxes him,” she said.

Pediatricians interviewed said they see no harm in playing music for infants. They said their main concern is that some parents might be tempted to use music as a convenient baby-sitter, depriving the child of important human contact.

“Music is all right, but it doesn’t replace people,” said Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and one of the nation’s leading child-care experts.

Part of the Discovery sales pitch is that music helps the babies, but there is only limited research on the subject. One Discovery package says, “Research has proven parents who lullaby their babies promote bonding, infant development and speech.”

Question of Research

Dr. Esther Wender, a pediatrician at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and head of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on early childhood, said she is does not know of any such research on the effect of lullabies.

“I don’t know of anybody who has studied it,” Wender said. She added, however, that she does not believe that listening to music would hurt a baby.

Ellen Wohlstadter said she has been informally gathering research on the subject. One Swedish study she said she found concluded that it was important to sing, even off-key, to a baby. A news article, she said, told of a Japanese study that showed that babies were soothed more by lullabies than by rock ‘n’ roll. Despite the statements on the packages, she said, Discovery does not emphasize the psychological angle in selling its music. “We promote it more as entertainment,” she said.

The business is operated out of the downstairs part of the couple’s spacious home in the foothills. One room is an office where orders are taken, publicity is planned and accounting work is done. The Wohlstadters share another office with the guts of a new $40,000 computer. The shipping department is in a guest house in the back yard.

Former Jobs

Ellen Wohlstadter previously worked in production and distribution for RSO Records, the New York label owned by Australian Robert Stigwood that scored big in the late 1970s with the “Saturday Night Fever” movie sound track. David Wohlstadter is a television sports producer who does free-lance work on weekends for the ESPN sports channel.

To produce a cassette, the Wohlstadters select a theme, then listen to hundreds of songs. Royalties of 5.25% are paid to the songs’ owners. They frequently use traditional songs, which are in the public domain and do not, therefore, require royalty payments.

Once the songs are selected, singer Joanie Bartels records them. The cassettes are made at a plant owned by Warner Communications. Instrumental versions are usually on the flip sides, and the lyrics are enclosed so that parents can sing the songs themselves, too.

The Wohlstadters also attribute their success to their marketing strategy--i.e., to first sell the cassettes through distributors to children’s furniture stores, toy stores, children’s book stores, children’s clothing stores and department stores. The cassettes are usually displayed on a stand on a store’s front counter. They felt, they said, that their product would have been lost among all the others in the typical record store.

New-Mother Market

“The new mother is the market we wanted to get, and the new mother does not go into record stores,” Ellen Wohlstadter said.

Their success has brought some growing pains, however. The Wohlstadters expect to have to get proper offices next year. They have mounted their first advertising campaign--an $80,000 expense--in magazines for new parents. And they are now considering whether they should expand into areas such as compact discs or videocassettes.

Still, Ellen Wohlstadter and others in the business believe that baby tapes won’t be a passing fancy.

“People used to sing a lot to their children,” she said, but “people don’t have the time today and often don’t know the lyrics.

“You can say it’s a fad, but if it was, people wouldn’t be buying it as much as they are.”